Wrap-Up

Source code management in Xcode is kind of a mixed bag. It’s deeply built into the IDE, such that just looking at the File Navigator serves as a reminder of your changes since the last commit, with all those M for “modified” and A for “added” files. And you can totally drive a basic pull/branch/commit/merge/push cycle entirely within Xcode. Yet… a lot of developers only use a few of these features, or even none at all, and keep their SCM work separate, using either a dedicated Git app or the git command-line tool.

It’s up to you to determine to what degree you want to depend on Xcode’s Git support. Personally, I like the visualization tools and find Xcode is effective for going through old revisions and using the Authors View to find where things went wrong with a complex codebase. And yet, I still tend to use the command line, sometimes because I have to (for fancy repository tricks like git rebase), but maybe also because old SCM habits are hard to break.